Imagine you’ve just gotten engaged to the girl of your dreams. Literally. Your interests align, she’s funny, smart, eloquent, intelligent, and ridiculously hot. She’s also Jewish, and wants you to convert, which fortunately for you isn’t a big deal at all, you’re down with Judaism, so you convert which does mean a circumcision since your parents didn’t believe in genital mutilation so you head over to the rabbi’s, a little nervous but fueled by two shots of Jaeger and you figure, hey, he’s chopped the skin off a lot of dicks and he probably has a lot of incredibly sharp stainless steel instruments and it’ll be quick and relatively painless, but after you arrive they don’t even give you a local anesthetic, they just rub a little steak sauce on the end of your Jack Johnson and push you into a room with a rabid starving African honey badger and by the time you fight your way back out your yoghurt slinger looks like a tube of freshly ground hamburger and it doesn’t improve on the taxi ride home because your fiancée is conspicuously absent so when you get home you check your voicemail and there’s a short message from her calling off the engagement because she just got back together with Chad, that fucking douchebag who used to beat you up back in middle school and who slept with your sister and then posted on Facebook about it, and your house is practically empty because they took everything, even your dog, and as you sink down onto the floor you get a text message from Chad with a picture of him teabagging the doorknob you just touched and a message advising that he left you an upper decker in the toilet.

Fix that feeling in your mind. You have just recreated what it’s like to watch the movie “Battleship“.

You probably think there is some hyperbole in the above paragraph, but I assure you that there is not.

At it’s core, it’s 2 hours and 19 minutes of an subtly homoerotic recruitment commercial for the U.S. Navy, Subway, Coke Zero, and the Ford F-250. The only thing it has in common with the game of Battleship is the title.

I went into the film with reasonably low expectations, assuming that it would be incredibly shitty and hoping for nothing more than a mindless flick with a lot of good explosions. Explosions there were, but the film is far from mindless – it contains the sort of excruciating stupidity that climbs out of the screen to assault your brain.

Plotwise we have Taylor Kitsch, your general deadbeat slacker pothead who’s constantly berated by his Navy officer brother who has his shit together. Taylor breaks into a nearby convenience store to impress a hot chick and is promptly arrested. We flash forward and he’s turned his life around and is now a Navy officer, because most people go from getting arrested for a felony directly into Navy officer positions.

After a sweaty homoerotic soccer game to establish Taylor is a dumbass (because the opening scene apparently didn’t establish that well enough), the plot gets going. Japan and the U.S. are participating in a giant homoerotic war game for reasons that aren’t clear. Everything’s going swimmingly until the aliens show up and trap a couple ships under a giant bubble but keep the other ships locked outside, and kill Taylor’s brother.

Oh yeah, there’s aliens.

Thus begins the middle half of this movie where nothing really happens and the crew of Taylor’s ship (and Taylor, who is now the ranking officer on his destroyer) stare into grainy monitors and watch lights beep dramatically. There’s really no point to any of this because it’s quickly established that the alien ships are completely indestructible and they can pulverize the destroyer with a single shot, but they don’t…because they’re stupid. There’s no strategy to it, no cleverness whatsoever. The aliens don’t attack.

Meanwhile, our B plot concerns Taylor’s girlfriend who’s a physical therapist and is out hiking around with a veteran who’s lost his legs. They stumble across a bunch of aliens who are on a mountain in Hawaii setting up a beacon to call home. Wacky hijinks ensue and the running time is padded considerably.

Eventually, our heroes managed to destroy the alien ships but their own ship is destroyed in the process. They still have to take out the mothership, though, and with no other option, they decide to use the USS Missouri, because when a fully stocked modern destroyer fails, why not use a much older decommissioned battleship that is currently serving as a fucking museum! They enlist a bunch of very old veterans to get the ship going and head out and murder the fuck out the aliens because decommissioned battleships serving as museums keep stores of live fucking ammunition. I haven’t seen anything that fucking retarded onscreen since cavemen learned how to pilot F-14s in a few hours in Battlefield Earth.

That’s about it. Liam Neeson is in it but he only has about six minutes of screentime and doesn’t actually do anything but pick up a paycheck. Battleship is also notable in that it marks the screen debut of Rihanna, who has the charisma and personality of a hunk of driftwood.

In terms of the quality of her acting, I would rank her several rungs below Kristen Stewart. I know of nothing worse to say about someone.

Overall, I think there’s something spectacularly ironic about a film depicting a fight between humans and aliens being so obscenely stupid that, if intelligent life does exist somewhere in the universe, they will probably avoid us on the basis of this movie alone.